(My) Earth Day 2024 in Northern Michigan

How green is the woods, at last!
 

Out in the Woods, Foraging

 

Earth Day breakfast salad

Sunny and I are out earlier and earlier these days. I find my treasures, and Sunny finds hers. Mine on Earth Day were leaves of the toothwort plant for my breakfast salad. Sunny didn’t turn up any “new” skeletal remains on Monday, but she’s already done pretty well for herself this year in that regard.

Her latest score

  

In the Bookstore, with Bags

 

The first people in the bookstore door on Earth Day came for book bags, and I was happy to accommodate, quite pleased with the look of the new bags, glad I went that route instead of t-shirts. After all, plenty of other businesses in town have t-shirts (very attractive ones), but mine is Northport’s only bookstore, so…. 

Also, with book bags, one size fits all -- unless, that is, a customer buys too many books for a single bag, but then the fix is as simple as a second bag.

 

 

Earth Day Reading

 

If I want to be righteous and largely ineffective [my emphasis added], I can hold onto my rage and resentments. You have the same choice. You can target me and others for our blind spots. Or you can get about the process of transforming yourself and one another. 

 

-      Chuck Collins, Born on Third Base: A One Percenter Makes the Case for Tackling Inequality, Bring Wealth Home, and Committing to the Common Good

 

Born on Third Base might not be an obvious choice for Earth Day reading, but it certainly worked for me. As Collins points out in his foreword, earth’s natural ecosystems are the basis for all wealth, so even the richest people alive (and those to come) are dependent on the health of the planet. Collins wants the 1% to realize that their self-interest is at stake in narrowing the wealth gap. He also wants the 99% to realize that, in order to protect our home communities, we need to forge alliances with the wealthy, and he has suggestions for how to do that.

 

…I urge us all to proceed with empathy, adopting powerful tactics of active love and nonviolent direct action to make this happen. Instead of a class war of shame, I advocate an appeal to common humanity and empathy.

 

I want to add here that partisan antagonism is no more likely to reform our troubled world than is class antagonism. Collins points out that no one responds well to being targeted, blamed, shamed, ridiculed, and treated as an enemy. It’s a stark choice: stand apart and feel superior and watch the world go to hell while blaming others -- or recognize the fears of, as well as contributions made by, those on “the other side.” I say we need to acknowledge our common humanity and reach out, because no one is right about everything, and no one is wrong about everything. 

 

It was, after all, President Richard Nixon who declared the first Earth Day in 1970, spurred to it by the massive Santa Barbara oil spill in 1969. It was also Nixon who first proposed the Environmental Protection Agency realizing that regulation was necessary to protect natural resources. Wouldn’t it be wonderful if today’s Republican Party were to rediscover their stake in the common good? How might that come about? Will demonizing help? Something to think about, because Earth Day isn’t something to put behind us until next year. Every day needs to be Earth Day.

Our beautiful home

Looking Ahead

Meanwhile, on the nearer horizon, this Friday, April 26, is Arbor Day, and in Northport a new tree will be planted in Marina Park, down at the south end near the little sailing school building, with the Tree Committee, Northport students, and community members all on hand for the 10 a.m. planting. 

 

The following day, Saturday, April 27, is not only Independent Bookstore Day all across the United States but also, here in Leelanau Township, the kickoff day for Northport Omena Restaurant Week. As there are five participating food purveyors within easy walking distance of Dog Ears Books, I figure Saturday should be a double-header day in Northport, eh?

Explaining Myself

Will be open on Monday, 4/22, for Earth Day!

Bookstore Notes

 

Maybe I got some ‘splainin’ to do. “Disproving skeptics for over 200 dog years”? What does it mean?

 

Well, when I opened Dog Ears Books in 1993, many people told me, shaking their heads sadly, “No one reads books any more.” The people uttering the gloomy words had voluntarily entered a bookstore and were happy to be there, but each one believed he or she was the last of a dying breed, the earth’s last living reader. 

Original Dog Ears, Waukazoo Street, 1993

Fast forward three decades, and I don’t hear that particular line as much. Many people still say, however, “Bookstores are going the way of the dinosaur” (or words to that effect), because while it’s become obvious that reading has not died out, doesn’t everyone order their books online or read on their electronic devices? 

 

No, not everyone. 

 

My bookstore would not be the self-supporting business it needs to be if the skeptics were right. So now here we are, coming up on 31 years later, and I am so confident going into the 2024 season that I have gone out on a limb and ordered canvas book bags emblazoned with my business name, logo, and that line about the mistaken skeptics, confident that yet another year will continue to prove them wrong and keep me here on Waukazoo Street, just up the block from where I started in 1993.

Back on Waukazoo Street since -- 2006?

Committing to a bookstore in a small village at the end of a peninsula means life in the slow lane for all but a few summer weeks. Nevertheless, it’s a life I chose with my eyes open, telling a new Northport landlord in 1997 that I was “in it for the long haul.” And almost 31 years later I have no regrets, because besides making a modest living, I meet interesting people all the time, and many have become my friends over the years. It’s a rich life.

 

Reminder: If you come to the bookstore for a book bag on Monday, 4/22, and bring a copy of our ad in this week’s Leelanau Enterprise, your bag will be $11 instead of $12. In-person, Earth Day special!

 

Outdoor Notes

 

First leeks

First spring beauties spotted, their petals furled, on April 12^th, by the next day opening their faces to the sun. Before that, wild leeks were already turning the woodland floor green. On the 14^th I saw my first trillium – again, flower bud closed tight. It won’t be long, I thought, until they are blooming madly, and in the meantime the first Dutchman’s breeches began coming shyly onstage. 

Spring beauties

I’d been thinking this Sunday would see a riot of spring ephemerals in bloom, but then our yo-yo temperatures took another plunge, snow threatened, and the little buds pulled their heads back underneath the covers for the chilly weekend. But soon!

First Dutchman's breeches

 

Dog Notes

Giving me a look!

Here’s a question: Do dogs understand the cycle of the seasons? Wild animals appear to do so, but dogs have been companions of humans for so long that maybe their seasonal sense has atrophied. Does Sunny remember last summer? Does she realize that another summer is on the way? Sometimes, when she has that “Oh, mom, you’re so boring!” look on her face, I would love to remind her of the fun she had the evening before and the fun that awaits her in the morning. If only I could explain! There’s a downside to living in the moment.

 

But co-evolving with self-centered humans, dogs have had to learn patience. No wonder we love them so! And isn’t it a joy when we can make them happy?

Meeting with friends!

Where Shall I Go Now?

This is not how it looked. This was an unintended fancy setting.

The past is no longer there.

 

When I learned that my friend Hélène had died – and although she was my mother’s age, it came as a shock -- I knew that Paris would never be the same for me. It was in her apartment on the rue de Vaugirard that I rented a room for the month of May 1987, and one of my fondest memories from the long-deferred dream journey David and I made together in September 2020 was an evening in an Auvergnat restaurant in Hélène’s neighborhood, David’s young English friend, Justin, completing our international quartet. “We’re making beautiful memories,” Helene said to me, leaning her head on my shoulder for a moment. 

From album of that trip in 2000

Was that really 24 years ago? We always thought we would go back. 

After the expected yet deep pain of losing our old Sarah to old age, followed by the more tragic loss of poor little Peasy, the Artist and I had a few weeks (all too brief) in which we thought about making a much longer, more roundabout trip back to Michigan in May, going north into South Dakota (a state David had never seen but where I was born) and then to the Twin Cities in Minnesota, home of children and grandchildren we hadn’t visited on their own home grounds for too long. But that trip was not to be….

 

One of my sisters spends a couple weeks in early spring down in San Miguel de Allende and says I’d love it there. People I’ve known for years here in Leelanau have bought a house in the south of France and tell me the guest room is waiting for me. “But I have a dog,” I tell them. I’ve crossed the U.S. between southeast Arizona and northern Michigan three times with Sunny Juliet, so domestic travel presents no problems (even Canada would be doable, except for big cities), but how could I leave my little partner to go out of the country?

***

 

The foregoing I set aside without posting and eventually put up something else instead. Travel? Not in my cards at present.

 

Then along came Sunday morning, as it does reliably every week, and the sky was a cloudless blue, sun bright, barely a breeze stirring -- features of the morning that may or may not come together on any given Sunday, so hallelujah! -- and I realized that I had not been any farther from home than Grand Traverse County for almost a year. Several errand trips to Traverse City and one drive to Interlochen were the extent of my “travel” since return from Arizona in May 2023. Also, this year April 15 marked 32 years since the Artist and I exchanged vows for the second time (Kalamazoo, MI, the first time; Paris, Illinois, second). 

Paris, Illinois, April 14, 1992

My gypsy feet itched for the road, and I thought about Benzie County. Specifically, there was allure in the idea of following M-22 south of Empire. But there was a loose button on my shirt….

 

 

Surprise trip back

 

So I got out my sewing basket, and found when I opened it a little red notebook, a diary from April and May of 2015, that began with our last days in Dos Cabezas – that is, the last days of our first time there, a mid-January to mid-April stay. We were eleven days on the road home that year, stopping often and doing a lot of sight-seeing, and every day’s sights and every evening’s stop were recorded in this book. I began reading and couldn’t stop, mesmerized by the memories brought back by my own handwritten lines. 

The little red travel diary

When I reached the last page and closed the book, I looked out my window at robins on still-bare branches and felt as if I had just crossed the continent again and had aged nine years in half an hour. That is the power of written words.

April 2015

 

The road to Benzie

 

Most of the day remained after my half-hour in the past, however, so dog and I, with camera, binoculars, water bottle, and water dish, piled into the car and headed south. Without going into all the details and every road we traveled, here are a few highlights from our Sunday on the road:

 

These were the true colors of Benzie County's Platte River.

 

Old work by beaver artist

Best views of Long Lake were from the road,

where there was no room to pull over,

so a tiny boat launching area was the best I could do.

In Frankfort, Sunny Juliet and I lunched at the A&W drive-in. 

A real drive-in! Shades of my childhood!

From there we drove around Crystal Lake to rejoin M-22, and then it was back home again and dog play for Sunny and Griffin, followed by bedtime with book and dog for me, finishing up my reading of William Kent Krueger's Windigo Island. Sunny and I slept well. We had had a big day.

The Mood Wasn’t Right

Sunny and a plethora of leeks

Lame Excuses

 

In the past two or three weeks, I have begun and discarded at least four posts for Books in Northport. Titles were: Tough Tourism; The House That Had Everything; “You Should Write a Book”; and Where do I want to go? Abandoned, all of them (though the draft beginnings still reside on my laptop desktop), and I know such finicky self-judgment is probably misplaced, as the nearly formless meanderings I occasionally throw out into the world, posts without any central theme or narrative thread, are often more popular and gain more comments than others I labor over to achieve a “finished” feel.

 

Leaves of dogtooth violet, a.k.a. trout lily

Ah, but then someone visiting my bookstore says, “I always read your blog,” and a note from a friend (received two days after a post finally went up) mentions that she has been looking in vain on Books in Northport for something new, and I know it’s time to kick-start my online presence. You don’t have to be “in the mood” – or inspired – to write! You just sit down and do it! And in the case of a blog, call a draft post good enough and hit that publish button!

Random Fungus (until someone identifies it for me)

 

Outdoors

 

Beginning with Sunny Juliet never hurts (see again opening image), because most people love dog stories or photos, my girl is lively and photogenic, and we get outdoors a couple times every day. Even in this morning’s light rain, we were out for a good hour, and as usual there was so much going on (every day at this time of year bringing signs of new life) that I was pulling my phone out of my pocket over and over to photograph my finds. The rain had decided me against taking the camera, but by Saturday, or Sunday for sure, the sun will be shining and those spring beauties – all over the woods! -- will have opened their petals to the light. 

Spring beauties are biding their time.

Plentiful though the wild leeks are, I never harvest them for my kitchen. If you do, never take more than 5% of a patch, and try to harvest where no one else has taken plants before. That will leave enough for coming years, as leeks are slow to mature and proliferate. 

Leeks close up

Toothwort leaves -- no flowers yet

 

We all have different tastes, in food as well as in books. Toothwort, now, is a different story for me, and I look forward to those peppery-spicy leaves and flowers in spring salads very soon. 

Everything is beautiful in its own way, isn't it?

 

That fungus close up looks almost like a rose.

In the Bookstore

 

Thursday, between customers (all from out of town and all gratifyingly appreciative), I worked with the advertising department at the Leelanau Enterprise on an ad to run in next week’s paper. Since Monday, April 22, is Earth Day 2024, I’ll depart from my usual schedule and have the bookstore open that day – if I’m lucky, with my beautiful new canvas book bags to sell, in keeping with Earth Day’s theme this year, “Planet vs. Plastics.” My regular customers know by now that any plastic bags I put their purchases in have been donated for re-use by other customers, but we really do need to eliminate plastics from our lives wherever possible, in the Great Lakes and across the nation. Agree?

And there will be, as there are just about every week, new books and “new” used book additions to store stock. As for me, I’ve been reading a lot of books set in the West lately, books full of mountains and dry washes, scarce water and hard living. I also made my way through a new memoir – what I call a “grief memoir – by Amy Lin called Here After. Although her husband was so much younger when he died than was mine, there was much that resonated with me in her experience. This, for instance: 

 

We shared a language that was all our own. I am now the last speaker of it.

- Amy Lin, Here After 

 

What must it be like for older adults who have to leave a country they've known all their lives and go to make a new life in a strange land with a whole new language? I am blessed to be able to remain in familiar and beloved surroundings.

Finally, Sunny's Mystery Treasure

Smaller than my hand...

Something's -- someone's -- partial skull, but whose? 

Is Spring in the Bag at Last?

Daffodils are in bloom and wild leeks aplenty pushing up underfoot in the woods. Sandhill cranes are back from winters in the sunny South, announcing their presence vocally in Leelanau (so far overhead that I haven’t had a glimpse of them yet, but they’re definitely here). Only last week we had another big snow, and it could always snow again; however, the air feels as if the season has turned the corner at last, not teasingly but sincerely. We shall see. I’m enjoying the increasing hours of sunlight, anyway.

 

Sunny Juliet and I have not yet resumed our agility work, except on an ad hoc basis in the woods, where a large fallen tree is an opportunity for her to “Walk it!” and “Table!” the signal for her to jump up on a stump. She is very happy, though, to have a new neighbor playmate and to tear around with Griffin while humans stand by and supervise. “A tired dog is a happy dog,” we tell each other contentedly. Then, “Watch out! Not right under our feet!”

[No new photos because their play date last night was cancelled.]

 

School is back in session in Northport following spring break, families back from their self-prescribed “cabin fever” vacations, and summer people returning to open houses and cottages for the nonwinter months. The annual migration holds once again, for cranes and humans alike.

 

One question bedeviling me occurred to a couple of friends, also, I learned when I mentioned it. We are struck by the number of fallen trees in the woods. It almost seems that there are as many big old trees lying on the ground, horizontal or nearly so, as there are upright specimens. Is this a misperception, or can it be true? And, if true, did the northern Michigan woods always have this appearance in the spring (and we are only now noticing), or has there been a recent massive die-off? Are all the fallen individuals perhaps ash trees and beeches, victims of recent pest invasions? Bottom line: Has the woods looked as it does now ever since county residents abandoned woodstoves for furnaces – or not?

Is there a forester out there with an answer to this question?

 

Three different people sent me the link to a story in The Washington Post (if you are not a subscriber, maybe a friend who is will gift you the article) about bookshops specializing in books that have been around the block before, and I appreciated most of the advice given in the article: Take your time; have a spirit of adventure; don’t crow to the owner when you find a book marked at a fraction of its value (just buy it and be happy, I say); look at the books and not at your handheld device. I loved the remark about small shops tending to be “zealously curated,” and I wanted to cheer at “Try never to leave a bookstore without making a purchase, if only a used paperback. It is the least you can do to support these defenders and bastions of civilization.” (Is that what I am? Not such small potatoes, then!) I was not as thrilled by “Bring a flashlight and expect to get dirty.” You wouldn’t want to eat off the floor of my shop, but then, it isn’t a restaurant, is it? 

In Northport, in addition to reorganizing subject areas in the bookstore recently to make room for new arrivals, I’ve also been planning for the future. Here are a few important days coming up on my calendar, which I urge you to put on your calendar, too:

 

Monday, April 22. Earth Day

 

Saturday, April 27. Indie Bookstore Day

 

Saturday, June 22. Visit to Dog Ears Books by author Bonnie Jo Campbell

 

In honor of the Earth Day 2024 theme, “Planet vs. Plastics,” and as a belated brag on 2023’s 30^th anniversary of Dog Ears Books, I will be offering beautiful new canvas book bags ($12), which will be no less appropriate on Indie Bookstore Day (always the last Saturday in April, and this year I’ll be here!) and perfect for carrying home your signed copy of Bonnie Jo Campbell’s new novel, The Waters -- plus, of course, any other treasures you find in my “zealously curated” collection on Waukazoo Street!

As we were in 2011 --